A lot of good games are made under the shadow of capitalism and it's weird to think about sometimes.
Like the whole concept of coin-operated arcade games. The extra life and continue mechanics seen in console games came from a cash incentive to make the player lose.
Or the fact that RPGs almost always charge the player for items. I'm not saying that it doesn't make sense as a mechanic, but I always wondered why people weren't given more healing potions.
The way IP laws work, I'm really curious how games would change once those are gone.
One way I see games changing with the destruction of capitalism:
I think online multiplayer games would be a lot more bearable. There wouldn't be the stratification between people who could afford putting more time or resources into a game and those who can't. Microtransactions and addictive gameplay mechanics wouldn't exist.
Many famous and genre defining games were made by small teams using off the shelf and open source software. Tetris was made by one guy. Stardew Valley was made by one guy. DOOM's team was eight people. OG Minecraft was pretty much just Notch and is arguably one of the most successful games ever. Mount and Blade was originally a husband and wife team; Armagan did most of the programming and Ipek did most of the art . The Spring engine is a community developed 3D RTS engine. Katawa Shoujo is a pretty much unique entry in the Visual Novel genre made by a small team.
Massive AAA games with hundreds of hours of uncompressed audio and photorealistic textures and mocap and all the other trimmings of COD require huge teams with huge budgets and the latest graphics cards and CPUs. But that doesn't necessarily make a good game.
There are games like Angband, Nethack, and the og Rogue that use ASCII for graphics and can run on almost any programmable computer currently existing, no matter how low-powered it is. And they remain fun and engaging decades after their initial release.
A huge number of famous games and mods were created by small groups of people working in their free time while maintaining full-time jobs.
Regarding computing; The cat is out of the bag. Even in a de-growth environment I don't see the personal computer disappearing. I see computers built for long-term durability and resilience, intended to be used for decades with repairs and part replacements as needed, but I don't see them just disappearing. Your smart-phone may weigh five lbs, have a frame made of steel, have a low-resolution screen, and have all user-serviceable parts, but I think the sheer utility of personal computing is as transformative and powerful as the development of metal tools or steam power.
As an example in the contemporary world; Cuba's famous 1950s cars that have been carefully maintained down through the years due to the severe economic restrictions that Cuba operates under are an example of keeping a functional technology running for a long time. We're used to a world where appliances and equipment are built to be disposable and thrown out and replaced every few years but there's no intrinsic reason to design things that way. We could (and should) build robust computers designed to last decades. look at old iMacs, or even 30 year old still functioning Apple iies, Atari's, Commodore 64s! A computer engineered for a long, long service life in 2022 could drastically reduce the overall material and labor inputs necessary to provide most people with a robust personal computer device.
Another example of the potential of durable technology to subvert the current paradigm of disposability that wastes massive amounts of labor and resources would be the old Nokia brick phones. They were, and are, notorious for their robust durability and rugged functionality. There's no reason that a smart phone needs to be a fragile, expensive toy like an iPhone. We could build every phone like a ruggedized field use phone and expect them to last a long, long time.
In the context of a revolution in the United States, we would likely see world war-like conditions, with widespread destruction and a sanctions regime. Focus will be on ensuring everyone can eat, not freeze to death or die of heat stroke, get medicine, etc.
Following that would be a rebuilding phase in which the former United States would be subjected to foreign imperialists or shielded in not-exactly-altruistic solidarity by, e.g., China.
Defending the revolution in the former case would mean continued cold/hot wars and a state of siege as we've seen elsewhere. Or maybe we got lucky and destabilized the entire core and there are no established imperialists, more or less - at least for a few years. If there's a need to defend the revolution from imperialists, there will be major mobilizations, materials will be scarce, and the number of people available to do things like code computer games will be small.
If the imperialists are temporarily subdued, we will be starting from a position of largely destroyed infrastructure. We will be traumatized and looking for separated family members. We'll be trying to hold down jobs to ensure our survival and will feel the fear of precarity every day for a decade. Sure, some people will try to make games because it's art and entertainment and we want to create and receive those things. But they'll do it in the context of there being 95% fewer complete and working computers and consoles, no supply chain bringing in new ones outside of what was needed for the military. Maybe a repair and refurbishing market will arise where people can bring the things they find (in bombed out or abandoned buildings, in dumps, on the side of the road) and get these devices to enjoy this form of entertainment. It will be relatively expensive, as an entire human will need to do that rather than make food or provide essential services. Maybe it's a part-time volunteer gig for a club rather than a shop. But still, it's not looking good for making or playing a lot of games.
In an area protected by, e.g., China (this assumes China is not also more or less destroyed in these events), maybe things could look different. Maybe infrastructure comes back faster, maybe supply chains are kept going from at least that part of the world and are capable of supplying people during the rebuilding of basic sanitation and agriculture and school and medicine. Maybe those things happen faster and we start to really see an approach of socialism.
This thread kinda gives me the sense that a lot of folks here are a bit too optimistic about what conditions will be like within a decade of what would be necessary for imperial core revolution. It would be a fight to the death with international capital. The whole thing. And it wouldn't happen until conditions had already degraded massively, to conditions where infrastructure was already shit for human needs, where services had been hollowed out to squeeze profits out of existing programs, not to mention pay vs cost of living. With huge numbers of desperate people, people who had to turn to drugs to cope with these scenarios, people who are traumatized. Surely there would be a fight with fascists. Fascists that could easily outnumber us at the beginning. Fascists targeting marginalized groups. Fascists with political power. There can be no assumption that life will look like it does now. Visit a recent war zone to get a sense for the stark and bleak realities and priorities humans face.
We know that revolution is necessary and inevitable, but we also have to know that it's a terrible thing that will be thrust upon us, assuming we are not bloodthirsty (I'm not, that's for sure!). And that recovery is in no way guaranteed to be easy or fast, even though we want to imagine the more distant, slightly utopian future where everything is like it is now, but with socialism added on top.